Eoin Morgan admits he has never known the start of a season like it. With Jonathan Trott's continuing battle with his stress-related illness placing his international future in considerable doubt, Kevin Pietersen's sacking and the indifferent contributions of Jonny Bairstow, Michael Carberry, Gary Ballance, Joe Root and Matt Prior during the Ashes tour, realistically there are England positions vacant at opener, No4, No5 and wicketkeeper. The door to the Test team is not just ajar, it is hanging off its hinges and Morgan, like plenty of others, is determined to seize his chance to stride back in.

"The appetite for county cricket is there, the hunger is there, with these opportunities that are arising," the 27-year-old says. "It's brilliant. I've never played county cricket before when there's been this much hype behind it. It's great for the game.

"Every year is a big year but with opportunities like this in the side, I think everybody sees it as a huge opportunity to take any role that they can in the England team. Certainly having played a bit in the past and really enjoyed my time in the Test team, I'd like to be back involved."

Ian Bell will presumably continue at No3 and Ben Stokes, if his recovery from a broken wrist continues to run on schedule, is pencilled in at No6 rather than in a third seamer's role, but the No5 spot has Morgan's name written all over it. The Middlesex batsman has not played in the England side since being spun unceremoniously out of the equation by Pakistan's Saeed Ajmal and Abdur Rehman in Dubai in February 2012. A focus on the shorter forms of the game followed but the recent state of flux around the England setup was enough to persuade him to make a late U-turn and forgo the riches of the Indian Premier League for the first time since 2009 in an attempt to win his place back in the XI.

"I was in the unique position in the interim between applying to go into the IPL auction and the auction itself," he said. "You're legally binded to commit to that contract. And then things happened where positions [in the England team] were in question and the thing happened with Kev. I spent a bit of time thinking about it and I had a meeting with Paul Downton [the managing director of England cricket] and discussed the possibility of maybe withdrawing. The ECB were very accommodating, they worked with the BCCI in getting me withdrawn and that was pretty much it,it was as simple as that."

Morgan began his first County Championship spring in five years first acclimatising to the differences between April in Britain and April in India – "It's a bit colder than Chennai" – and then landing a confident first blow in the battle for a Test spot with a fluent 86 in a partnership of 203 with another England hopeful, Sam Robson, against Nottinghamshire at Lord's. His team-mate's performance was enough to convince him that the 24-year-old born in New South Wales is ready for the Test arena. "Watching him this week, absolutely. He was very calm at the crease, knew his game inside out, his ruthlessness of just wanting to score runs was very impressive,"Morgan says. "If I was choosing the team tomorrow I'd pick him."

While Robson is at the start of his Test career, Morgan admits that there were "some stages" when he thought that his own was over after only 16 caps. "In a way, when you're out of the side you feel so far away from playing, it's quite strange really," he says.

"But in many ways I look back at how I got there, and it literally happened just like that. I went from having a good one-day year, we won the T20 World Cup [in 2010], came back played a game for Middlesex, and then I was playing Test cricket. I know things can turn around as quickly as that."

But, at two years and counting, it has not been a particularly quick turnaround since Morgan was consigned to ODI and T20 specialism. He can take heart from the fact that a plethora of players – from Graham Gooch and Matthew Hayden to Carl Hooper and Andrew Strauss – only truly bloomed in Test cricket in the second half of their 20s.

And despite his exile, Morgan has no regrets about putting the emphasis of his career on the 50- and 20-over game. "I don't think a lesser stint at the IPL, an extra two or three months, April months, in England would have helped me in any shape or form," he said.

"In fact, I think playing in front of 80,000 people, being the overseas player, playing under pressure, helps you far more in the long term than worrying about your technique in April."

Eoin Morgan was speaking in the buildup to the NatWest T20 Blast season, which starts on Friday 16 May. Buy tickets at www.ecb.co.uk/natwestt20blast